Sunday, April 17, 2011

It seems that I pretty much abandoned my blog. I quickly realized that writing is just not my thing, but photography is. That said, to celebrate the 1-year mark of my trip, I thought I'd summarize all the randomness that happened to me in a top-50 list. Writing a list of sentence fragments where each item has nothing to do with the preceding one was far more enjoyable than writing sentences that have to relate. And since my choice of religion is Hedonism, here it is, in no particular order.

·Learned to scuba dive

·Ate a raw sea urchin

·Lost my hotel room key and unlocked the door using a straw and a hairclip

·Rode on a motorcycle loaded with luggage

·Learned to cook Thai and Laos food

·Couchsurfed

·Got my phone stolen by a monkey

·Dropped a phone in the waterfall and saved it

·Hired a motorbike to chase a bus that I had missed

·Rode an elephant

·Drank home made rice wine (30% alcohol)

·Saw how tea and coffee grow

·Dove and snorkled with sharks

·Saw Russians in every single country

·Saw the milky way over the ocean

·Got a job for three days photographing at a bar

·Saw hundreds of monks collecting food at sunrise

·Paid a guy to carry my backpack

·Hiked/Climbed the highest peak in se Asia

·Skied in the Alps

·Went to the full moon party

·Found Russian food in Cambodia and Vietnam

·Ran through the jungle at night

·Swam to an island

·Hiked to a lady's home through the jungle for 15km to have dinner with her family

·Went to a hospital in Thailand

·Got bitten by various fish

·Went to the Chinese border with the sole purpose of giving it the finger after being denied a visa

·Visited minority tribes in several countries

·Saw fresh water dolphins

·Crawled around in caves trying to photograph bats

·Was a nanny to a 2.5 year old for a week and a half

·Saw snakes, rats and monkeys on a menu

·Saw dog meat at a market

·Went to the water puppet theater

·Spent the night at a train station in northern France

·Saw bears in Laos

·Kayaked exploring islands and caves in Halong Bay

·Was on a bus that stopped because a man with a dead squirrel was running behind it while the passengers were hanging out of it with hands full of money, bargaining who gets the dead squirrel.

·Gave out pens to tribal kids

·Was invited by a tribe teacher to his home for a few beers where I hung out for a couple hours, having many wonderful conversations while neither of us spoke each others’ language

·Stood on the corner of a street for a few hours with the sole purpose of photographing people on motorbikes

·Spent 4 hours each night for several nights trying to photograph lightning

·Filled up a motorcycle from a hand pump and Coca-Cola bottles

·Walked on sand dunes

·Allowed a large gecko to live in my room because he ate the mosquitos